New development in Libya arms trafficking case

Last November I covered the story of Marc Turi, an arms dealer who was indicted for allegedly lying on his export license application. He is accused of declaring Qatar to be the “end user” of his weapons when he intended for them to end up in the hands of anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya. Turi’s defense has utilized the public authority defense, alleging that he was part of a covert operation to arm the Libyan rebels in 2011.

In a filing by Turi’s defense team from a couple of weeks ago requesting the disclosure of certain grand jury materials, an incident before the grand jury in which the prosecution silenced a retired CIA officer is cited. The retired officer, David Manners, served as the CIA’s station chief in both Prague, Czechoslovakia and Amman, Jordan. During his grand jury testimony on 2 July 2013, he “began to explain covert arms transfers to the grand jury, believing it to be germane to the Government’s line of questioning.” In his own words:

I was abruptly interrupted by the attorney for the United States who told me to stop speaking because I was not asked a question. Near the conclusion of my testimony, a member of the grand jury asked whether the United States Government, either directly or indirectly, supplied weapons to the Libyan Transitional National Council. I began answering the grand juror’s question affirmatively, but was again abruptly interrupted by the same Assistant United States Attorney who said something to the effect of “You don’t know that.” But I do “know that.” It was then, and remains now, my opinion that the United States did participate, directly or indirectly, in the supply of weapons to the Libyan Transitional National Council.

According to the defense’s filing, this conduct on the part of the prosecution may enable a dismissal of the indictment. It cites a case in which it was ruled that charges may be dismissed when “[prosecutorial] misconduct has significantly infringed upon the grand jury’s ability to exercise its independent judgment.”

The case may appear bizarre since the US government seemingly has little incentive to railroad its own covert arms dealers. But when read in context with a New York Times article from 5 December 2012:

Mr. Turi said he believed that United States officials had shut down his proposed arms pipeline because he was getting in the way of the Obama administration’s dealings with Qatar. The Qataris, he complained, imposed no controls on who got the weapons. “They just handed them out like candy,” he said.

Washington Times: Hillary’s State Dept. sabotaged Libyan ceasefire talks in 2011

Not the best source, I realize, but it sounds consistent with everything I’ve heard previously:

On the day the U.N. resolution was passed, Mrs. Clinton ordered a general within the Pentagon to refuse to take a call with Gadhafi’s son Seif and other high-level members within the regime, to help negotiate a resolution, the secret recordings reveal.

A day later, on March 18, Gadhafi called for a cease-fire, another action the administration dismissed.
Soon, a call was set up between the former U.S. ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, and Gadhafi confidant Mohammed Ismael during which Mr. Ismael confirmed that the regime’s highest-ranking generals were under orders not to fire upon protesters.

“I told him we were not targeting civilians and Seif told him that,” Mr. Ismael told The Times in an telephone interview this month, recounting the fateful conversation.

While Mrs. Clinton urged the Pentagon to cease its communications with the Gadhafi regime, the intelligence asset working with the Joint Chiefs remained in contact for months afterward.

“Everything I am getting from the State Department is that they do not care about being part of this. Secretary Clinton does not want to negotiate at all,” the Pentagon intelligence asset told Seif Gadhafi and his adviser on the recordings.

Communication was so torn between the Libyan regime and the State Department that they had no point of contact within the department to even communicate whether they were willing to accept the U.N.’s mandates, former Libyan officials said.

Mrs. Clinton eventually named Mr. Cretz as the official U.S. point of contact for the Gadhafi regime. Mr. Cretz, the former ambassador to Libya, was removed from the country in 2010 amid Libyan anger over derogatory comments he made regarding Gadhafi released by Wikileaks. As a result, Mr. Cretz was not trusted or liked by the family.

Shutting the Gadhafis out of the conversation allowed Mrs. Clinton to pursue a solitary point of view, said a senior Pentagon official directly involved with the intervention.

“The decision to invade [Libya] had already been made, so everything coming out of the State Department at that time was to reinforce that decision,” the official explained, speaking only on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Article is mirrored here.

Previous blog posts on Libya here.

Prosecution of arms dealer could lead to disclosure of covert US-run trafficking networks among Arab states

You may remember news stories from 2011 about how a simple billing lawsuit between aviation companies resulted in the disclosure of numerous details about the CIA’s rendition and torture program. A similar consequence may result from the US federal government’s prosecution of an arms dealer who is accused of attempting to sell weapons to Libya’s anti-Gaddafi forces without a license.

The case revolves around the arms trafficking business of Marc Turi. The investigation appears to have been first reported in December 2012 in the New York Times. Turi was described as having homes in both Arizona and Abu Dhabi. His business apparently sold “small arms to buyers in the Middle East and Africa, relying primarily on suppliers of Russian-designed weapons in Eastern Europe.”

According the US government’s indictment, Turi stands accused of violating the Arms Export Control Act by lying on his application for an arms trading license by declaring Qatar’s government the “end user” for the weapons in question when he intended for them to end up in Libya.

Turi and his defense team asserted a public authority defense by claiming that he and his company were working in collaboration with a covert US operation to arm Libya’s anti-Gaddafi rebels. As one of his lawyers put it at a pretrial conference (p. 22):

Very simply, Your Honor, the notice discloses kind of our intent to pursue a defense along the lines which Mr. Mackie alluded to, that Mr. Turi acted on behalf of agencies of the United States government. He acted with public authority. And in proving that, we are entitled to discover relevant information; things that make it more probable that he did that. And, if, for example, Mr. Turi did things the way they are simply done in the business of clandestine arms traffic- — clandestine arms procurement, a business that he’s licensed to conduct, a business he has conducted on behalf of the United States government before, then the way in which it is done is relevant.

Obviously proving this may be challenging because of the very nature of covert operations being top secret and generally undocumented. The defendants have submitted a laundry list of documents it requests for discovery to the court (adding to the mystery, an exhibit on page 67 reveals an email from now deceased US Ambassador in Libya Christopher Stevens to Turi).

In a court ruling issued 22 October, US Judge David Campbell for the US District of Arizona rejected the majority of these requests as overly broad. However, he did accept the need for partial disclosure when he stated the following: “the Court will require the government to produce a narrower category of information: documents which relate to efforts by the United States to arrange for arms brokers to arrange covert transfers of weapons to the NTC [Libyan anti-Gaddafi forces] in Libya between the beginning of 2010 and the end of 2011.”

In the New York Times article mentioned earlier, the following is asserted:

Mr. Turi said he believed that United States officials had shut down his proposed arms pipeline because he was getting in the way of the Obama administration’s dealings with Qatar. The Qataris, he complained, imposed no controls on who got the weapons. “They just handed them out like candy,” he said.

There is so far no indication pointing to the above for this prosecution in any of the court documents I have reviewed and not even the defense team appears to find it worth mentioning. But this case is by no means over, and that means that new disclosures could be coming out any day now.

More documents from this case can be viewed here.

The strange case of Marc Turi and US arms shipments to Libya: Court documents unsealed

New York Times, 5 December 2012:

The case of Marc Turi, the American arms merchant who had sought to provide weapons to Libya, demonstrates other challenges the United States faced in dealing with Libya. A dealer who lives in both Arizona and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Turi sells small arms to buyers in the Middle East and Africa, relying primarily on suppliers of Russian-designed weapons in Eastern Europe.

In March 2011, just as the Libyan civil war was intensifying, Mr. Turi realized that Libya could be a lucrative new market, and applied to the State Department for a license to provide weapons to the rebels there, according to e-mails and other documents he has provided. (American citizens are required to obtain United States approval for any international arms sales.)

He also e-mailed J. Christopher Stevens, then the special representative to the Libyan rebel alliance. The diplomat said he would “share” Mr. Turi’s proposal with colleagues in Washington, according to e-mails provided by Mr. Turi. Mr. Stevens, who became the United States ambassador to Libya, was one of the four Americans killed in the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11.

Mr. Turi’s application for a license was rejected in late March 2011. Undeterred, he applied again, this time stating only that he planned to ship arms worth more than $200 million to Qatar. In May 2011, his application was approved. Mr. Turi, in an interview, said that his intent was to get weapons to Qatar and that what “the U.S. government and Qatar allowed from there was between them.”

Two months later, though, his home near Phoenix was raided by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Administration officials say he remains under investigation in connection with his arms dealings. The Justice Department would not comment.

Mr. Turi said he believed that United States officials had shut down his proposed arms pipeline because he was getting in the way of the Obama administration’s dealings with Qatar. The Qataris, he complained, imposed no controls on who got the weapons. “They just handed them out like candy,” he said.

Court filings from the case have been unsealed on PACER as of 19 November, and the docket up to today can be found here.

Below are some of the documents I have downloaded so far:

Doc. 003 – Indictment (2014-02-11)
Doc. 012 – Initial Motion to Dismiss Indictment (2014-07-23)
Doc. 051 – Transcript of Pretrial Conference (2014-09-03)
Doc. 055 – Initial Motion to Compel Discovery (2014-09-22)
Doc. 056 – Government’s Response to Defendants’ Motion to Compel Discovery (2014-10-03)
Doc. 057 – Reply in Support of Initial Motion to Compel Discovery (2014-10-10)
Doc. 072 – Motion for Complex Designation (2014-11-18)

Also of interest is this 22 October court ruling available on Google Scholar.

GOP hacks find they disagree with arming radical Sunnis when a Democratic president does it

The wingnutty Accuracy In Media‘s Citizens’ Commission On Benghazi has released an “interim report” titled How America Switched Sides in the War on Terror. It makes the following “explosive” claim:

The U.S. was fully aware of and facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qa’eda-dominated rebel militias throughout the 2011 rebellion. The jihadist agenda of AQIM, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), and other Islamic terror groups represented among the rebel forces was well known to U.S. officials responsible for Libya policy. The rebels made no secret of their al-Qa’eda affiliation, openly flying and speaking in front of the black flag of Islamic jihad, according to author John Rosenthal and multiple media reports. And yet, the White House and senior Congressional members deliberately and knowingly pursued a policy that provided material support to terrorist organizations in order to topple a ruler who had been working closely with the West actively to suppress al-Qa’eda. The result in Libya, across much of North Africa, and beyond has been utter chaos, disruption of Libya’s oil industry, the spread of dangerous weapons (including surface-to-air missiles), and the empowerment of jihadist organizations like al-Qa’eda and the Muslim Brotherhood (p. 4).

This is hardly news to anyone who has followed Ronald Reagan’s arming of the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviets, Bill Clinton’s arming of the Bosnian and Kosovo Muslims against the Serbs, and George W. Bush’s arming of radical Sunni movements throughout the Middle East as a counter-weight against Iranian influence. The fact is that the US has always made use of Sunni radicals with ties to al-Qaeda when it finds it is convenient to do so. It has done this under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

What this report is trying to do is tarnish the Obama administration by asserting that we’ve never armed al-Qaeda tied militants before Obama came into office. Of course, that’s complete and total bullshit. The authors of this report are helpfully profiled at the end of the PDF to give us an idea of the opportunistic Republican shills we are dealing with here. One of them, John A. Shaw:

Established that massive amounts of high explosives and chemical weapons were clandestinely moved to Syria by Russian troops just before the beginning of the Iraq war. Those Iraqi chemical weapons provided a massive foundation for the current Syrian arsenal of chemical weapons. Shaw’s efforts established definitively the presence of WMD in Iraq and the way in which they were dispersed despite a widespread international effort to cover up their presence (p. 28).

Uh-huh.

So overthrowing a secular dictator in Iraq, thereby giving al-Qaeda and other Islamist radicals a new breeding ground, was perfectly fine of course because a Republican president did it.

The report also entertains the notion that the Obama administration used the Benghazi attack to restrict Americans’ free speech rights:

The CCB conducted an extensive research effort into the elements and sequence of the administration’s two-week campaign to falsely claim that a protest had preceded the attack on our Benghazi mission, and their efforts to blame a YouTube video for the attack. The White House campaign appears to have been well-coordinated with U.S. Muslim Brotherhood organizations as well as Islamic state members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), who all joined in condemnation of the video, and, even more troubling, issued calls for restrictions on Americans’ free speech rights.

This is also not a new allegation. Dana Milbank reported in 2013 that Clare Lopez, one of the authors of this report “speculated that the administration covered up the Benghazi events because Obama wants to make it illegal to criticize Islam” at a Heritage Foundation event.

The report contains some interesting assertions about Gaddafi’s willingness to negotiate–possibly even abdicate his leadership–in order to end the violence plaguing Libya in early 2011. The report alleges that Gaddafi’s pleas were recklessly ignored by the Obama administration, just as the Bush administration ignored Saddam’s attempts to prevent the US military’s invasion of his country.

In short: the report touches upon some important questions and makes some decent points, but is ultimately limited by its authors’ ridiculously partisan and conspiratorial outlook.

Why the GOP’s “Benghazi” rallying cry isn’t working

While it’s clear to me and a few others that the 11 September 2012 deadly attack on a US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi was a rather direct consequence of the US-backed 2011 regime-change, it is a connection that that practically no one in the American media or political arena is making today. Instead of criticizing Obama for involving the US in yet another unnecessary foreign adventure that destabilized an already inflammatory region in a way that ended up biting us in the ass, the Republicans are making increasingly contorted allegations concerning the way the Obama administration described the attack after it happened. The latest iteration of this involves accusations that the White House edited talking points. Needless to say, this is not very exciting stuff. Nor is it very convincing.

The problem is this: the Republican Party is still hopelessly intertwined with neoconservative interventionists as the Democratic Party is in bed with liberal interventionists. Despite the often purported “isolationism” of the Tea Party movement, very little has changed in the GOP’s promotion of a militarized and fundamentally interventionist foreign policy. This is true even among Tea Party favorites. Sarah Palin–who built her media persona as being a “renegade” against the GOP establishment–largely endorsed the overthrow of Gaddafi while expressing some reservation over the Obama administration’s “mixed messages.” Mark Levin, a firebrand talk show host who is notorious for berating the alleged anti-Tea Party stance of the GOP, went as far as defending the Obama administration against claims it overstepped its Constitutional bounds by intervening without Congressional approval. While it is true that Michelle Bachmann and Allen West made statements against the Libya intervention, this opposition was rarely voiced and–in the case of West–inconsistent with an eagerness to get rid of Gaddafi.

And don’t even get me started on the man who the GOP nominated to run against Obama.

Muammar al-Qaddafi was a tyrant who terrorized the Libyan people and shed American blood and the world is a better place without him

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) October 20, 2011

Because the GOP finds itself incapable of condemning the regime change that took place in Libya, it is significantly hampered in the range of criticisms it can throw at Obama over Benghazi.

Also worth considering is this 2006 story:

Syrian guards foiled an attempt by suspected al-Qaida-linked militants to blow up the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday, exchanging fire outside the compound’s walls with gunmen who shouted “God is great” and tried to storm in with automatic weapons and hand grenades.
[…]
The rapid response by Syrian guards won rare praise from the United States, which accuses President Bashar Assad’s government of supporting terrorism in its backing of Hezbollah guerrillas and Palestinian militants.

“I do think that the Syrians reacted to this attack in a way that helped to secure our people, and we very much appreciate that,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. No Americans were hurt, and the embassy was not damaged.

White House spokesman Tony Snow also thanked Syrian officials and called for Damascus to “become an ally and make the choice of fighting against terrorists” (AP, 12 Sep. 2006)

Perhaps the Republicans could do US embassy workers more of a favor by keeping tabs on Obama’s regime change policy in Syria than by grandstanding over edited talking points.

Take it away Mr. Kucinich:

Neoliberal reform in post-Gaddafi Libya

Ventures Africa, April/May:

The efficacy in distributing oil wealth throughout the country will not necessarily be a cure for all of Libya’s ills but it will be the jumping-off point for recovery from the collapse of the previous government and a disruptive civil war. Part of the difficulty involved in making sure oil revenue is properly used will be reforming Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC), formerly the Libyan National Oil Company, which had been run under 40 years of Qaddafi’s dictatorial rule. Oil produced prior to 2011 in Qaddafi’s Libya was subject to 95 percent tax aimed mostly at multinationals. The figure has now decreased to approximately 75 percent, on par with energy giants like Russia and Norway. With nothing but time to bide, the proper divestiture of oil revenue to a vulnerable population, coupled with a flourishing democracy, may just reverse the bygone days of Qaddafi’s centralised socialism.